KiwiGreg

Azeraph

I must be young as i was a Thunderbird rerun child of the seventies and an acolyte of the British comic 2000ad as well as Man from Atlantis and bill bixbie’s The Hulk. Stingray reruns, Dads Army, Faulty Towers. Now there’s just Mrs Browns boys for top British comedy and some strange Sci fi mixed in with equally strange American comedy.

Sam Buchanan

Yeah, UFO was great. I remember my, and a fellow UFO fan’s, evening being made by the unexpected appearance of George Sewell (who played Col Alec Freeman in the series) in a Christmas panto in London I was attending with rather limited expectations.

I remember my Dad coming home with Dinky diecast scale models of some of the spaceships and vehicles from Anderson’s series, and can still almost feel the heart-bursting thrill of actually holding in my hand Thunderbird 2, for instance.

I still think UFO was better than anything else he did, though is puppet-based series were great entertainment also. I had a scale model Interceptor and a SHADO mobile. They’re probably all packed away somewhere back home. And I wanted to be Ed Straker more than anything in the world. Still wouldn’t say no if the chance arose. The series kicked off a lifelong interest in space exploration, and spurred me into winning a science fair with a project mapping UFO sightings in Wellington (there were a surprising number).

What a great pity that we don’t get a chance to pay tribute to people who’ve impacted our lives until they’ve passed away. I just hope Gerry Anderson knew how many boys (mostly, I imagine) he’d not just entertained, but inspired, during his life.

CrazyIvan

RIP Gerry Anderson – I grew up on many of the shows, wasn’t that big a fan of Thunderbirds, though it got a little more thought when I realised how much Rodney Hide looked like the Mask.

I especially liked:
– Captain Scarlet, with its plots where the humans never really succeeded.
– Stingray with the weird talking fish-men, the base of apartment blocks that sunk into the ground and the mute Marina
– Joe 90, where they kid and his professor father were always doing jobs for ‘Uncle Sam’ and was set in 2012!!
– Space 1999, with Alan, the Australian pilot who kept crashing the Eagle spaceships,
– UFO with its string vests, submarines that turned into aircraft and spaceships that could only fire one missile.

Longknives

SGA

@Longknives – Parker was one of my favorite characters – I seem to remember an episode where IR were trying to free someone from a vault(?) for the whole episode and he simply picked the lock (or maybe time has ravaged my memory). Somewhere I still have T1 to T4. T2 has T4 in it rather than the Mole.

@CrazyIvan – Joe 90 and BIGRAT (and the loopy car thing) – yes, I was a fan at the time.

But Captain Scarlett was always the “blackest” series of the lot (except for the Angels, of course).

hmmokrightitis

Sam Buchanan

“spaceships that could only fire one missile”

I always thought the moon interceptors from UFO and the Eagles from Space 1999 were some of the great TV/movie spacecraft. The ‘lumpy’ look of the interceptors and the ‘container handling equipment’ look of the Eagles made them seem practical and believable, rather than the ‘let’s just make them look cool’ thing that most tacky SF goes for.

mikenmild

The UFO series remains my most favourite TV memory, and the opening sequence and title music are still exciting. I was so jealous when a friend was given a model of one of the Mobiles, complete with missiles that fired. I have the whole set, and I think it still stands up quite well today. Love those freaky costumes – ‘Century 21 fashions by Sylvia Anderson’.